Abstract
The ectomycorrhizal symbiosis was long thought to be restricted to temperate forests. However, as tropical forests have been explored, it has become clear that these habitats host unique ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi. We have been exploring tropical dry forests (TDF), which are endangered terrestrial ecosystems and hotspots of endemism. Since Fabaceae is the main plant family in this environment, we hypothesized that trees in this lineage would be the main ECM hosts. We sequenced the ITS rDNA region from fungi and both rbcL and trnL cpDNA from plants to identify both symbiotic partners from root tips. The systematic position of each symbiont was confirmed by Bayesian phylogenetic inference. We identified 20 plant species belonging to 10 families that hosted 19 unique ECM fungal species from 5 lineages. Most ECM fungi were associated with Caryophyllales, not with Fabaceae. Achatocarpus and Guapira, the main hosts, are scattered throughout the forest and are not in monodominant patches. The low ECM fungal diversity can be explained by the low density of host plants and their high specificity. Our results indicate that Caryophyllales is an important order of tropical ECM hosts with at least four independent evolutionary lineages that have evolved the ability to form ectomycorrhizae.
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Acknowledgments
This study was funded by CONACYT Ciencia Básica 239266 and PAPIIT IN223114. The MEXBOL network supported DNA sequencing through the CONACYT 1251085 grant. We thank to Posgrado en Ciencias Biológicas from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. We acknowledge the Academic Writing Team of the Centro de Estudios de Posgrado, UNAM, for their help with this manuscript. MES received support from the US National Science Foundation grant DEB 1354802. We thank Leho Tedersoo and Jeremy Hayward for their assistance in the methodology for the plant identification. We are also thankful to Mohammad Bahram for his helpful comments, and two anonymous reviewers that improved the article. We thank Estela Sandoval-Zapotitla for her help at the anatomical slices of ectomycorrhizae. We thank to the Biological Station of Chamela and its entire staff.
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J.A.M. and R.G.O. were responsible for the experimental design. J.A.M. made the field work, laboratory proceedings, and the data analysis. J.A.M., R.G.O., and M.E.S. wrote the manuscript.
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Alvarez-Manjarrez, J., Garibay-Orijel, R. & Smith, M.E. Caryophyllales are the main hosts of a unique set of ectomycorrhizal fungi in a Neotropical dry forest. Mycorrhiza 28, 103–115 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00572-017-0807-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00572-017-0807-7